Kite Surfer 02 - Long Exposure combined with Stills

Another Daytime Long Exposure combination with Still images. This image was specifically hard to create as there was a lot of activities in the water that I wanted to convey yet still have the timeless and elegant feel of a long exposure. So as you can see, its not the classical black and white long exposure image. 

To make the ‘surfers’ work with the concept of the image I had to show the motion of the waves in the water, doing a long exposure would have eliminated detail in the waves that was relevant to the composition.  So instead of working with 10 or 13 f-stop ND Filters, I was working with 3 or 6 F-stops to get the blurriness of the kites and the waves.  Additionally, I wanted to keep some colour in the image as each kite was so bright and colourful it would have been a shame to show any evidence of that.

To learn more and get additional tops on Daytime Long Exposure Photography, please go to: www.SharonTenenbaum.com where you can find the ebook: How to Create Long Exposure Fine Art Photography

Daytime long Exposure – Composite of 3 Images!

For those of you that have been following my Daytime Long Exposure you can see that I enjoy creating images that are a composite of more than one image. My first attempt was the Algarve Wind Farms, a year later the Southern Straits Boat Race and now, I want to introduce my Kite Surfer #1. 

My vision in this technique is to convey the range of motion of the subject matter.  In the world of photography, we are reducing reality from four dimensions onto a two dimensional slate (we reduce it even further of we convert to black and white as it is not our reality, we see the world in colour and not b&w).  By using time as an additional tool in your creative arsenal, you can expand the limited range of expression within the world of photography.

Within Daytime Long Exposure Photography, subject matters are normally complete stagnant, such as rocks, land or building, as in Architectural Photography, and the moving part of the image is either clouds or water.  Since my subject matter of wind farms, boats, kite surfers are all dynamic and have an ‘in-between’ range of motion, I wanted to find a way to implement them into the composition and found that artistically it works best if their motion is frozen within the image.  In a way it resembles panning, although we know that the subject is moving, we freeze it and have everything around it in motion.

The image below is a composite of three images:

1. The sky:  4 minute exposure with 13 f-stop ND filter
2. The water: since I wanted to get the motion of the waves and not a marble slate effect, a 6 second exposure in the mid day sun with a 6 f-stop ND filter
3. Lastly a still shot of the kite itself and the surfer.  TIP: don’t hesitate to change lenses for the close in detail shots, I took this one with a 200 mm lens while the rest were with a wide angle 24 mm.

End Result:

Kite Surfer #1, Tel-Aviv, Israel

To learn more and get additional tops on Daytime Long Exposure Photography, please go to: 

www.SharonTenenbaum.com where you can find the ebook: How to Create Long Exposure Fine Art Photography.